"It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting our high technology from WEAPONRY to LIVINGRY."

One of Canada's loudest proponents of basic income has been former Tory senator Hugh Segal. In a HuffPost blog in 2013,
he wrote that we can't let "the ideological conceit that a rising tide
lifts all boats obscure the hard reality that many Canadians have no
boat or access to anyone who has ever had a boat."

The Liberal membership, meanwhile, passed a priority resolution
last year calling for the party to "design and implement a Basic Annual
Income." However, there is no mention of it in the Liberal's
just-released election platform.

The federal NDP have been mum on the subject throughout the campaign,
preferring instead to discuss a $15 minimum wage for federal workers —
though there have been murmurs that Alberta's NDP government might give it a trial run with support from the mayors of Calgary and Edmonton.
The
Green Party, however, has made basic income one of the most important
planks of their platform, tying it to their anti-poverty efforts and
their elder care strategy. Dubbing their version the "Guaranteed Livable
Income" (GLI), the Greens would use "a single, universal, unconditional
cash benefit delivered through the tax system" to replace the current
complex system of federal and provincial support.

The Greens would then give every
Canadian a regular GLI payment and set a minimum income level just above
the poverty line. After that point, the GLI would be gradually taxed
back until it was eliminated at a ceiling of, say, $60,000.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May:

It's just that as people make more, they get into the range of being
tax-paying citizens. It's a good thing to give it to everyone because we
eliminate income splitting that Stephen Harper brought in and generally
only benefits families that are better off. This is a program that
ensures that everyone can live with dignity.

It is very efficient
because it costs a lot of money to check up on single mothers to see if
she moved in with her boyfriend. It makes much more sense to give
everybody a cheque so that you have no economic poverty anymore. People
who receive that money are spending that money, they are happy to go out
and make more money.